Annals of Anthropological Practice最新文献

We use a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses to examine 1354 survey responses from members of the American Anthropological Association about their practice and teaching of cultural anthropology research methods. Latent profile analysis and an examination of responses to open-ended survey questions reveal distinctive methodological clustering among anthropologists. However, two historical approaches to ethnography remain prominent: deep hanging out and a mixed methods toolkit, with the former remaining central to the practice and teaching of all forms of contemporary cultural anthropology. Further, many anthropologists are committed to advancing research methods that account for power imbalances in fieldwork, such as through community-based and participatory approaches. And a substantial number also teach a wider array of methods and techniques that open new career pathways for anthropologists. Overall, our study reveals a core set of ethnographic practices—loosely, participant-observation, informal interviews, and the experiential immersion of the ethnographer—while also highlighting the great breadth of cultural anthropological research practice and pedagogy. The findings presented here can help inform how current and future anthropological practitioners and educators position themselves to meet the ever-changing demands of community members, funders, clients, collaborators, and students.

We examine the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on teaching and learning in an Engineering School of a large US research university. We focus on the adjustment of instructors as they converted their courses to distance teaching and learning formats (e.g., virtual sessions, online forums) and on bachelor student experiences with those changes. While both instructors and students experienced liminality, the pandemic affected these groups differently. Instructors attempted to form communitas with their students by prioritizing their teaching responsibilities, increasing the accessibility of course materials, and being more available to students compared to pre-pandemic times. However, students struggled to adapt to online learning contexts which lacked the sense of togetherness previously offered by in-person classes, study-groups, tutorial sessions, and communal study spaces. Unable to interact with their peers and create communitas, learning online proved to be an ineffective “solution.” Interacting with classmates and working in study groups are among the practices that can help students adjust to course delivery changes, even if it means those cultural practices go virtual. We argue that higher learning institutions, regardless of type (e.g., R1, R2, liberal arts, community colleges), should strengthen their remote teaching approaches. However, those strategies should incorporate: building strong relationships within and across roles, designing inclusive teaching and learning practices that take the contexts in which students learn into account, increasing spaces for peer-to-peer learning, and becoming proficient in the technologies needed to teach virtually.

Cambodia is a country facing an unprecedented wave of development but also the delicate task of conservation of traditional heritage. Pottery is one of the crafts that the Khmer civilization had been able to produce in various forms, of which mainly two are found in the country today. One style, produced in the province of Kampong Chhnang, is utilitarian and has a fairly solid internal market due to the still predominant agricultural society of Cambodia. It is unglazed, and aesthetically unadorned, but nonetheless “traditional” in its simple features. Another ware, produced mainly in pottery studios related to the Royal University of Fine Arts in the capital Phnom Penh, is, quite bombastically, but not without a certain consciousness, retrieving and repeating in a modern key, the ancient royal pottery once produced at Angkor. The latter ware style is, ironically, mainly produced for the tourist business in present-day Cambodia, and therefore, arguably superfluous for the country's living cultural heritage. This article investigates the two modes of production and attempts to elucidate why different practical and aesthetical approaches are selected for different purposes and markets by practitioners and retailers, according to certain cultural interpretations of what is supposed to be “traditional.”

A relatively novel, laboratory-produced, hemp-derived psychoactive cannabinoid called “Delta-8 THC” has become widely available to consumers since 2020. Lack of federal oversight and a loose patchwork of regulations by states have resulted in numerous “adverse events” reported by poison control centers and the CDC, and even warnings from the industry itself. Yet consumer demand for cannabinoids like Delta-8 THC has risen sharply. Published social science studies of Delta-8 THC use are in their infancy and have yet to document the social context of use, consumer preferences and motivations, behaviors, embodied experiences, perceptions of risk, and risk mitigation. We conducted 25 in-depth, qualitative interviews with consumers of Delta-8 THC to give insight into consumer practices and preferences. Data show that consumers of Delta-8 are aware of supply chain vulnerabilities but deploy personal calculations of risk-benefit and personal strategies of risk mitigation to reduce perceived threats.

The quest to ensure maternal health has long been in focus, mainly since the Safe Motherhood Initiative of the 1980s. Maternal health is contingent, among other things, on the availability of maternal health care services and the context in which the services are available. Therefore, we conducted rapid ethnographic research at four public hospitals in Southwest Ethiopia to gain anthropological insights into maternal health, maternal health-seeking behavior, and healthcare services. We collected data from maternal near-miss patients, patients with obstetric fistula, and health professionals working in maternity and labor wards. Our data reveal that there has been a huge effort to promote institutional delivery and ensure maternal health in the study area. However, failure to consider socioculturally embedded issues undermined the outcome of these efforts. We suggest that maternal health-seeking for institutional delivery and, hence, ensuring maternal health should be understood as a process that should take into account these socioculturally embedded issues.

Despite the growing market in industry, government, and non-profits for anthropologists, and their evident success there, anthropology has no real framework for teaching students about the practical applications of anthropology. This pattern appears at all degree levels—bachelor's, master's, and PhD. With that in mind, the Anthropology Career Readiness Network set out to investigate and identify some of the main gaps in academic training with respect to practice. Using Delphi surveys, we queried practitioners about perceived gaps in their training. The results showed that respondents felt quite underprepared in terms of job search strategies. They also lacked skills in transferring anthropology to workplace settings and explaining the value of their discipline to people in those settings. Although sobering on one level, our study points to a clear path ahead for curriculum development. The Network continues to work with practitioners, students, and instructors to build our collective capacity to prepare people to enter the workplace of their choice and to thrive there.

When it comes to climate crisis research, current debates are increasingly thematizing the needs but also the challenges of collaborative, transdisciplinary work. Geophysical characterizations of climate change are increasingly deemed insufficient to respond to the challenges that vulnerable communities face worldwide. In this paper, I describe the work of studying-while-caring for an environmental data infrastructure in order to address this issue. I suggest framing “data management” anthropologically as a question of collective stewardship that is better conceived as a “knowledge infrastructure” (Edwards 2010) instead of a formal approach to automated data curation. To examine the sociotechnical blindspots of data management, I elaborate on the anthropological concept of “infrastructural blues” based on the data engineering work I conducted. For the conclusion, I discuss the concept of “common” as a substitute for “open” technologies and address the broader implications of the proposed shift toward community stewardship and self-determination as guiding practices for socio-environmental data governance.

Although qualitative interview studies provide in-depth understandings of the opinions and lived experiences of social groups, they are typically small in scale, bounded by a small number of physical or virtual spaces, and designed to capture relatively demarcated aspects of participants’ experiences. This paper describes the qualitative component of a large mixed method study of homelessness in California. The qualitative study consisted of seven substudies across eight counties, each exploring different dimensions of homelessness. We recruited participants from the overall sample, a statewide representative sample of adults experiencing homelessness recruited in eight counties, based on their responses to questions from the survey interviews. Using a novel data management strategy, we analyzed each substudy as a stand-alone project, and explored the relationship between thematic content across the substudies. Our mereological study design presents an approach for developing complex qualitative policy studies across a range of topic areas.

In Syracuse, New York more than 10% of children are lead poisoned each year, a toxic exposure that lowers the children's ability to learn and increases risky behaviors in adolescence. African American children are affected at nearly twice the rate of White children. We describe a community-university collaboration to reduce childhood lead poisoning in Syracuse, and the effects these efforts have had on public policy to date. This paper documents the effectiveness of the Community Action, Research, and Education model to deliver community-based prevention strategies on child lead poisoning in Syracuse, New York. The community-based strategies were successful for promoting legal and policy change, increasing the public awareness of this tragic problem, holding elected and appointed officials to their commitments in addressing this toxic injustice, and obtaining needed intervention and disability accommodations for lead-poisoned children in the community and educational institutions.

While anthropologists have played roles speaking out for marginalized groups, formalized to combat Antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia, they have also aided in the marginalization and oppression of communities, justified colonialism, and put the communities they have studied at risk. In recent decades, anthropologists have rethought the way research is conducted, presented, and justified to reduce harm to communities. Despite these shifts, anthropological training has been slow to include activist work by women of color and other marginalized people, leaving anthropologists-in-training with limited concrete guidance on how to apply their anthropological lens to social justice. Addressing this gap, this article centering a Black feminist analysis offers an interview conducted between anthropology students and a professor of anthropology, giving insights into how anthropological thought can be applied to activism and advocacy. Centering Black feminism is not only important to redress historical marginalization within the discipline. By centering the lives of marginalized people within an intersectional lens, Black feminist analysis provides a mandate to rethink theoretical models, such as political ecology, the dominant frame anthropologists have used to address disasters and climate change. Also importantly, centering Black women's bodies and embodied experience uncovers the urgent necessity for self-care during fieldwork. Prof. Felima embodies both these challenges, and offers candid advice to students, inspiring a two-way dialogue.